12/31/2004

Today is Part Two of this blog’s second annual review of the performance of the Los Angeles Times, which is known to readers of this blog as the Los Angeles Dog Trainer. Part One examined the paper’s coverage of the 2004 presidential election. Today’s post discusses other issues, such as the paper’s campaign against Justice Scalia, the editors’ leftist views on various “culture wars” issues, the op-ed page under Michael Kinsley, errors made by the paper this year, and other topics.

12/30/2004

It is time for this blog’s second annual review of the performance of the Los Angeles Times, which is known to Patterico readers as the Los Angeles Dog Trainer. The first annual review was posted one year ago, at this link.

Documenting a whole year’s worth of this paper’s distortions, omissions, and misrepresentations is a Herculean undertaking — much like when Hercules cleaned a year’s worth of manure out of a barn in a single day. The parallels are striking indeed.

In fact, because there is too much material here to put in a single blog post, I have decided to divide the review into two parts. Today’s post is Part One, and examines the paper’s coverage of the 2004 presidential election. Part Two will be published tomorrow, and will discuss all remaining issues.

The Los Angeles Times is the paper whose editor, John Carroll, delivered a speech this year in which he said:

All over the country there are offices that look like newsrooms and there are people in those offices that look for all the world just like journalists, but they are not practicing journalism. They regard the audience with a cold cynicism. They are practicing something I call a pseudo-journalism, and they view their audience as something to be manipulated.

Although Carroll was referring to another media outlet, I couldn’t help but wonder whether he was talking about the editors at the L.A. Times.

Without further ado, let’s get to the pseudo-journalism of the L.A. Times in covering the 2004 presidential election:(more…)

Armed Liberal reports that the mullahs in Iran are torturing bloggers as a way to silence them. The spread of blogs in places like Iran is currently one of the most important developments in the world. Armed Liberal says that we need to focus high-level international attention on this problem. I agree. Spread the word.

Tomorrow, I will publish Part One of my Year-End Review of the L.A. Times. (I have decided to split the review into two parts, since there’s just too much material for one post.) By the time you’re done, you’ll be tempted to ask: does this paper ever do anything right?

Of course, it’s only fair to note some of the good things the paper did this year. So I have decided to put them in a separate post, and preempt critics who say I have only bad things to say, by saying the good things first, here.

Here are some of the good things that I noticed this year in the L.A. Times:(more…)

The L.A. Times finally printed a story about Omar and Mohammed of Iraq the Model. The story doesn’t focus exclusively on them, but discusses other Iraqi blogs as well — and, naturally, takes care to point out how far out of the mainstream of Iraqi opinion the Iraq the Model blog supposedly is.

But the [Iraq the Model] blog has also drawn sharp scrutiny for its unabashedly pro-U.S. stance, which places it in contrast to other Iraqi blogs and polls of Iraqi people. Some U.S. bloggers have even tagged the brothers “propagandists” — which they vehemently deny.

“At the beginning, they said, ‘You are not Iraqis living in Iraq. Now they say we are recruited by the CIA,” Omar lamented at a recent gathering at the Hollywood Hills home of U.S. blogger Roger L. Simon. “Maybe we are CIA agents and we don’t know,” his brother joked.

Funny: the anti-U.S. blogs are not described as having received any “sharp scrutiny.” Nor does this article provide any. Par for the course.

I haven’t disappeared. I’m visiting family and working on the Dog Trainer Year in Review post. It’s looking pretty good so far. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Sheesh. Did you know that Movable Type puts a limit on the length of a blog post? I kept losing material, until I figured out why: the post was too long! (It’s about the length of a good-sized book chapter.)

12/27/2004

In another entry in the “Rumsfeld is the New Ashcroft” department, World Net Daily, a less-reliable conservative news site (occupying the middle ground between NewsMax and CNS), reports on, and Drudge picks up, Rumseld saying that Flight 93 was “shot down” over Pennsylvania.

Conspiracy mavens are, understandably, all over this. However, this is another example of where reading the entire quotation would help.(more…)